


Apastron

by meoqie



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Keith's time alone in the desert, M/M, Presumed Dead, VLD Tropes Fest 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-02-10 02:57:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12902469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meoqie/pseuds/meoqie
Summary: "After getting booted from the Garrison, I was kind of lost and found myself drawn out to this place. It's like something some energy, was telling me to search. It's an outcropping of giant boulders with caves covered in these ancient markings. Each tells a slightly different story about a blue lion, but they all share clues leading to some event, some arrival happening last night."These carvings are a prophet. Keith feels Delphic, a third eye opened to the truth and comprehension.“There’s something more out there,” he says out loud to the listening silence.





	Apastron

**Title:** Apastron   
**Trope Showcased:** Presumed Dead   
**Author:** anonymous   
**Rating:** Gen   
**Content:** Mourning, Keith’s time alone in the desert, probably too many space metaphors, present tense   
**Warnings:** None   
**Disclaimer:** All recognizable characters belong to Dreamworks, Netflix, the creators of Voltron, and associates. No copyright infringement intended.   
**Summary:** Keith grieves Shiro alone in the desert and finds a new purpose

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Wind whispers over the cracked earth of the desert, coating everything in a fine layer of dust. Keith imagines he can feel it settling into the sweaty creases of his skin and filling his lungs just like it collects along the windowsills and the corners of the porch, turning him into just another sandy crag. The thought is actually kind of appealing to him, becoming one with the earth. He has nightmares, lately, of gravity being reversed and getting sucked into the vast abyss of the sky.

Once, the stars sang his name, beckoning him into the beyond like the irresistible call of a siren. Now, he can’t stop thinking about how the stars seen from earth are long dead, burned out in the eons it takes for their light to reach the planet's atmosphere. The night sky above is an infinite cemetery, stretching above him like a macabre canopy, making him feel all the more alone. 

Keith longs for the oppressive heat of the daylight while he sits, sleepless, throughout the night. A blue curtain dropped over the earth like a mourning veil, scattered photons dispersing the sun’s radiation. He doesn’t want to think about the distance between earth and the most distant moon in the solar system, but he does anyway. He had memorized the numbers, and now they were burned into his brain.

 

Four point six seven billion miles at Pluto’s aphelion, two point six six billion miles at the perihelion, plus or minus the approximate five hundred seventy-three miles of Kerberos’ own orbit.

In short - far enough that a retrieval mission is an impossibility; the Garrison doesn’t possess those resources. Supposedly. There are secrets and lies and files locked behind security clearance blocks that Keith never had the skills to dismantle, although not for lack of trying. 

 

Keith tells himself it was what Shiro would have preferred, his final resting place among all the other brilliant stars in the galaxy. That there’s something beautiful and poetic and fitting about it, instead of just sad. Anger burns through him and he lights another cigarette. His legacy should have been the same as a dead star, bright and magnificent and shining on long past his death. Instead, ‘pilot error’ tarnished his name. 

 

They’d put a ‘Kerberos rescue mission’ in the roster of simulations. Keith had felt sick. He thinks that was around when he decided to stop trying, when he gave up all pretense of giving half a damn. Liars, liars,  _ liars _ , all of them. He refused to lie to himself anymore. Without Shiro to orbit around, he had no trajectory of his own. 

 

Smoke curls up around him as he leans against the wooden rail of his rickety porch with a sigh. It groans beneath his weight but holds.

“I miss you,” he whispers to the sky. “I don't know who I am anymore. I don't know why I'm still here.”

Loneliness is an ache behind his breastbone, less sharp than the grief but more all-encompassing. Deep in the desert, a presence hums in response, his loneliness like a beacon in the dark. 

It calls out to him, in his moments of vulnerability. It’s too strong and too big and too mysterious and it fills him up with longing like he’s never known. Keith wakes more than once with tears drying on his cheeks.

It’s somehow easier to deal with than the grief over Shiro’s death. It gives him direction and distraction. More than once, he considers that he’s losing his mind.

He follows the call into the desert anyway. What does he have to lose. 

 

The carvings at least reassure him that he’s perfectly sane. There’s something out here, and it wants him to listen. 

So he listens.

With the same fervor he’d once poured into studying to reach the stars, Keith dedicates all his free time to exploring the tunnels and pillars covered with carvings of what looks like mechanical lions.

Sprawled with sun-warmed stone on his back, he downs half a bottle of water at once and stares at the carving across from him.

“How come no one has found you before?” Keith murmurs. “This feels like a pretty significant discovery. But no one knows about this but me.”

He doesn’t share his findings with anyone, despite his musings. It feels… sacrilegious, somehow. These aren’t meant for the world. Just him. Rationally he knows that’s kind of ridiculous, but there’s no one to judge him out here. 

There’s something almost terrifying about all the freedom he has after the strict rules and regulations of the Garrison. A freefall into empty space. There’s nothing to grab on to, nothing for his obsessive thoughts to catch on and stop their endless cycling. 

What ifs chase through his head over and over and over. None of them will bring Shiro back.

 

Grief deeper than his own howls through his body like wind through the canyons, stripping the flesh from his bones and leaving him bare and sun-bleached. Keith feels like a sudden clairvoyant, unprepared for the ghosts whispering in his head. One of the voices is Shiro’s. 

Strings stretch between bright colored pushpins stabbed into a board on his wall, creating patterns he doesn’t even fully understand.

His life has become a waking fever dream, insights tickling the edges of his consciousness before slipping away into the endless fog. 

 

When clarity comes, it collapses on him with startling gravity. It knocks the wind out of him, and for a moment Keith can’t breathe.

 

_ Arrival. _

 

These carvings are a prophet. Keith feels Delphic, a third eye opened to the truth and comprehension. 

Overhead, the sun hasn’t changed in the cloudless sky, the desert is still hollow and empty and filled with the same unnamable energy. But the universe has still shifted somehow, and his comprehension is pushing the edges of the known universe.

“There’s something more out there,” he says out loud to the listening silence.

Theoretically, it’s an awareness he already possessed. It’s impossible to study space and know it’s immense size and believe the tiny and insignificant blue planet of Earth plays host to the only life in the universe. Part logic, part the terror of being alone in something so vast, the concept of life elsewhere in the infinite galaxies is akin to knowing grass is green and the sky is blue. It simply  _ is _ without having much of an impact on daily life. Background noise, wallpaper; always there and therefore easy to disregard.

But that’s what the Kerberos trip had been about - finding evidence of life on other planets. 

Keith laughs shortly. If only they had known evidence was within a stone’s throw away from the Garrison itself, hidden in the desert that was yet another aspect of life that was easy to dismiss as irrelevant. People don’t pay attention to the things they take for granted.

Did Keith take Shiro for granted? Was he such a staple in the periphery of his existence that he stopped noticing the depth of it, the value of a human connection. 

 

He counts down the days to the fulfillment of the prophecy, his stomach winding tighter and tighter with anxiety. He doesn’t know what to expect, so he prepares for the worst.

 

The very last thing he could have anticipated was Shiro returning from the dead.

 

Words crowd his throat and choke out his emotions.

“It’s good to have you back,” Keith says blandly.

It’s such a distilled version of what he’s thinking and feeling, but it’s all he can manage.

The desert turned him into a witch, a mouthpiece for something arcane, and now he’s forgotten how to be human.

If he’s being honest with himself, he was never particularly good at humanity to begin with. 

Shiro always made him forget about that.

His shoulder is warm and solid underneath Keith’s palm. Not a ghost any longer.

“It’s good to be back.”

 

The universe shifts once more, so palpable that Keith can almost hear the decisive click of pieces slotting into place. He takes a proper breath for the first time since the announcement of the loss of the Kerberos mission.

Rage that had been suppressed by the grief is burning in his stomach again.

The Garrison had lied, concealed, and had tried to silence Shiro. The continued stinging in his knuckles that lingered from the previous night’s fight is satisfying. He wants to tear the Garrison down with his bare hands.

 

The knowledge that Keith thought Shiro was dead lays between them like a chasm, something they’ll have to address at some point.

How do you resume a relationship with someone you already mourned? 

But Shiro gives him a reassuring smile, and Keith feels secure in knowing they’ll figure it out somehow. 

It won’t go back to how they used to be, because they’ve become different people from who they were, but that’s alright. The mere existence of the opportunity to relearn each other is enough.

 

Keith loves him. 

 

Someday, maybe, he’ll find the words to tell him. 

**Author's Note:**

> This work is a part of [VLD Tropes Fest 2017](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/VLD_Tropes_Fest_2017)


End file.
